Contents

The Story About the Story II

1) Wendy Lesser, “The First Novel”
2) Phillip Lopate, “Worldliness and Regret: The Charterhouse of Parma”
3) John Berryman, “The Development of Anne Frank”
4) David Shields, “The Only Solution to the Soul is the Senses”
5) Zadie Smith, “Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean?”
6) Charles Baxter, “Sonya’s Last Speech, or, Double-Voicing: An Essay in Sixteen Sections”
7) Thomas Mann, “Anna Karenina”
8) Jane Tompkins, “The Last of the Breed: Homage to Louis L’Amour”
9) Joyce Carol Oates, “Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel”
10) Martin Amis, “Philip Larkin”
11) Margaret Atwood, “Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells”
12) Michael Dirda, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
13) Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”
14) Nicholson Baker, “Defoe, Truthteller”
15) James Thurber, “The Wings of Henry James”
16) Elizabeth Hardwick, “Billy Budd”
17) David Foster Wallace, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”
18) Jacques Barzun, “Lincoln the Writer”
19) Vivian Gornick, “Grace Paley”
20) H.L. Mencken, “Theodore Dreiser”
21) Susan Cheever, “Little Women”
22) Ralph Ellison, “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction”
23) Francisco Goldman, “2007-2003”
24) Katherine Anne Porter, “Reflections on Willa Cather”
25) Harold Bloom, “Trust the Tale, Not the Teller: Hans Christian Anderson”

The Story About the Story I

1) Charles D’Ambrosio, “Salinger and Sobs.”
2) Virginia Woolf, “An Essay in Criticism.”
3) Sven Birkerts, “On a Stanza by John Keats.”
4) William Gass, “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.”
5) Dagoberto Gilb, “The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy.”
6) Vladimir Nabokov, “The Metamorphosis.”
7) Alain De Botton, Excerpt from How Proust Can Change Your Life.
8) Seamus Heaney, “Learning from Eliot.”
9) Salman Rushdie, “Out of Kansas.”
10) J.C. Hallman, “Portentous Evil.”
11) Michael Chabon, “The Other James.”
12) Cynthia Ozick, “Truman Capote Reconsidered.”
13) James Wood, “What Chekhov Meant by Life.”
14) D.H. Lawrence, “Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick.’”
15) Geoff Dyer, Excerpt from Out of Sheer Rage.
16) Czeslaw Milosz, “Robert Frost.”
17) Phyllis Rose, Excerpt from The Year of Reading Proust.
18) Randall Jarrell, “The Humble Animal.”
19) Susan Sontag, “Loving Dostoevsky.”
20) Edward Hirsch, Excerpt from How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.
21) E.B. White, “A Slight Sound at Evening.”
22) Walter Kirn, “Goodbye, Holden Caulfield.  I mean it, Go!  Goodbye!”
23) Oscar Wilde, “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume.”
24) Fred Setterberg, “Into Some Wild Places with Ernest Hemingway.”
25) Robert Hass, “Lowell’s Graveyard.”
26) Hermann Hesse, “Thoughts on ‘The Idiot’ by Dostoevsky.”
27) Frank O’Connor, “An Author in Search of a Subject.”
28) David Lodge, “Waugh’s Comic Masterpiece.”
29) Milan Kundera, “Somewhere Behind.”
30) Albert Camus, “Herman Melville.”
31) Wallace Stegner, “On Steinbeck’s Story ‘Flight.’”